Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann, a poetic background

Robert Schumann, the leading figure for all the musicians of the “1810 generation”, practically never left Germany where he shone for his critical writing and his musical compositions. A highly gifted child, he wrote novels, stories and poems at the age of twelve. His father owned a bookshop and passed on his taste for literature introducing him to the poetry of Paul Richter and E.T.A. Hoffmann who would remain part of his universe.

Schumann: music and madness

An outstanding pianist, Robert Schumann quickly turned to composition and produced an opus 1 for piano, Variations on the name “Abegg”, when aged only nineteen. He imposed his own style in the rhythmic and harmonic originality of his visionary and imaginative short pieces and fragments. It is very difficult to distinguish Schumann’s artistic from his sentimental life since all aspects of his existence were so largely dominated by his, at first opposed union, with the brilliant virtuoso and composer, Clara Wieck. This continued right up to the silence imposed by illness, which lead to his death. In 1854, possessed by increasing insanity, Schumann threw himself into the Rhine after having composed enigmatic pages like the Songs of Dawn. Saved by fishermen, he spent the last years of his life in a psychiatric hospital.